1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of communications and, more precisely of short range RF communication between transceivers.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, low power RF systems have been proposed for providing communications between a plurality of transceivers through a short-range communications link. One such short-range RF technology is currently under development and is referred to as “Bluetooth”. This system will be commercially available in the near future and it operates in the open spectrum around 2.45 GHz. This unlicensed radio band, called Industrial, Scientific, Medical (ISM) band is globally available. The operating range of this RF system is approximately 10 meters for a normal power mode and has proven to be economically efficient. It is planned that a Bluetooth chip having these characteristics will be inserted in all kinds of electrical devices for enabling communication between separate devices. In publication WO 00/18025, such a Bluetooth link between a Bluetooth enabled mobile terminal and a Bluetooth enabled data terminal, such as a PC, is disclosed.
Bluetooth technology suffers from a relatively small bandwidth, which is the unavoidable downside of the technological choices that have been made to ensure very low cost implementation. It would be therefore very important to structure the usage of this limited bandwidth so, that performance does not degrade below a level where it is not practical to use Bluetooth technology anymore. This is especially crucial for point to multipoint communication patterns, where several client terminals are connected to a single service provider terminal (that is usually fixed). The Bluetooth standards as described in the Bluetooth specifications do not offer any solutions to this bandwidth depletion problem. When there are several devices to page, the paging protocols use a significant part of available bandwith diminishing the available bandwidth for content delivering between client device(s) and the fixed device. This diminishing bandwith leads to slower data transfer rates in the Bluetooth link making the Bluetooth link more inefficient.
The same applicant also has U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/614,508 filed on Jul. 11, 2000 that discloses Bluetooth beacons (access points) having three or more Bluetooth transceiver modules for communicating with other access points or hosts for forming a Bluetooth network. This is for forming a path between a host and the terminal via e.g. three access points, but the application takes no standpoint on increasing user data transmission rates between an access point and a user terminal.